Meaning of Life

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"Do you know yourself?" asked Bhante Jinadata in tonight's Dhamma Talk at BMBMC.

We should always ask who we are.Most people knows a lot of external things; they had gained lots of knowledge but most of us never search for the answer to who are we.

Because of this, there are times when we find life has no meaning at all. Living becomes meaningless.
What then is the meaning of life? It is happiness that brings us the meaning of living. However, we have to be certain which part of life can we find this happiness. If we equate life to success and think that we can only find happiness in success, then at times we may not be happy. This is because, we are looking at the ultimate of our goal and hoping to find happiness there.

We should realised that the ultimate (the end) of our search are relative and not absolute. There is no guarantee that we will always encounter success. Occasionally we may also encounter failure as everything is conditioned.

So we should look at the means and not the end. We should find happiness in the means, in the process, in the doing process.

To further illustrate this point, Bhante said that many people take up meditation because they want to achieve something. But if we think that after meditating we must achieve something like able to see nimmita or some kind of vision then we are wrong and will not be able to be happy. We had view achieving something in meditating as successful and if we don't achieve something then we considered our meditating as failure. This then brought to unhappiness and hence, there is no meaning in meditating. Then we should be happy with this act of doing meditating. Hence we will not be conditioned to think that success will brings us happiness.

Sadhu! Sadhu! Sadhu!